Two private planes collided on the runway of a Houston airport early last week. Luckily, no one was seriously injured, and the ultimate nightmare scenario of a midair collision did not transpire. Investigators are still looking into the incident, though early reports suggest the air traffic controllers were responsible.
New York Times (archive):
“We just had a midair,” the pilot of the Hawker is heard saying in an audio recording posted on LiveATC.net, which shares live and archived recordings of air traffic control radio transmissions.
Someone in the control tower responds by saying, “Say what?”
“You guys cleared somebody to take off or land, and we hit them on a departure,” the Hawker pilot says.
The recent accident in Houston is just the latest noteworthy instance in what a major New York Times investigation this summer determined to be “an alarming pattern of safety lapses and near misses in the skies and on the runways in the USA.” According to internal records of the Federal Aviation Agency, the Times reported that these safety lapses and near misses occurred as a “result of human error.” The Times report further revealed that “runway incursions” of the sort described above have nearly doubled, from 987 to 1732, despite the widespread proliferation of advanced technologies.